Echo

Three couples go out on dinner dates:

faith rooted in optimism + faith rooted in pessimism

faith rooted in optimism + faith rooted in optimism

faith rooted in pessimism + faith rooted in pessimism

Which couple creates the most energy?

saturn. the father. the stern taskmaster. you make us fear things the way fear felt when we were emerging beings, viewing the world through a pinpoint of consciousness from within a dark cave, when we still had no sense yet of what the hell was going on. you scare a person enough while he’s in this stage, and he’ll perpetually walk through life like he’s lost in a game in which he doesn’t understand the rules. it’s the same reason you don’t shake an egg before it hatches.

tyrant father.

you liked tormenting those weaker than you, didn’t you?

but it never killed the smallness you felt inside the root of you.

because father issues are the mother of all issues.

it’s going to stop.

let up on some of these people, okay? they are good people who are way too hard on themselves, thinking they are incomplete or flawed. you are making them feel sad and angry. small. some who are so much bigger are playing small in hopes that you don’t turn your brutal eye on them, or are playing small in hopes it will please you into offering kindness. some have abandoned their personal power in their need to escape. you need to be a better leader like the sun.

when i told someone in confidence that i needed an army to stand up to you, people started following me. they can feel the same feeling, a readiness for emergence. they can feel there’s some truth in this, and they have hope. what binds us is that we believe that we are better than this, timid caged people terrified of their father. they believe that if they can expand the positive energy inside them, it would be so powerful as to render you a ghost.

is it too idealistic of me to think that we can coexist? this is not a war. this is a peaceful return to balance. we are not weak, but we are not threats. we are going to stand up, very slowly, and you’re going to let us. you will be awed by what you see, our size, our numbers, our gentle power. and then, you’re going to step back, and you’re going to let us walk away, to unlock the cages of others.

In my writing workshop, we did a short impromptu writing exercise where we had to write the beginning of a story that starts with “Once upon a time…”

Once upon a time, a man and his toaster had a dispute.

The man was groggy from a late night of spying on his neighbors across the alley who were of dubious nationality (someplace where the men were swarthy with perpetual forehead sweat and the women their coy properties). He was convinced they were running some kind of third-rate brothel out of their dumpy 1 BD + den. He had already been irritated with the coffeemaker which had released a thick little poot of grounds in its final gurgle of release, thus ruining the entire pot. Now the toaster refused to relinquish his toast.

I’ll shake you, he said, waving a knife at the toaster. The indifferent toaster didn’t even blink, knowing if the man so much as tried to pry that precious meal from his insides, he would give him a shock to remember.

I’ll throw you in the alley like the tea kettle!

The toaster remembered the tea kettle, the shy, red KitchenAid possessing an unassuming allure. He had grown fond of her in the summer months when she sat quietly on the backburner, watching the rest of the kitchen go about its business while she, herself, remained a wallflower.

The man was always a coffee drinker but the one time he attempted to make tea for an obese, inane lady friend with a double chin and a peculiar smell, the teapot’s shrill announcement of the water boiling inside her so discombobulated the man that he burned his pinkie on her red backside and promptly defenestrated her out the window.

The entire kitchen was horrified.

They had staged a passive-aggressive rebellion ever since.